Additions to Skype

It seems the recent acquisition of Skype by eBay is doing wonders for the free VoIP service.

You may not have heard of Skype yet. It’s a program, easily downloadable off the Net, that allows you to speak to anyone in the world using your computer speakers and microphone as if on a normal telephone call, over an ordinary Internet connection. The technical term for this kind of software is Voice Over Internet Protocol (you may have heard of it).

What makes Skype so cool?
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Share and play tag on the new web playground

“It’s the latest wave on the Web: tools that combine search with tagging and social networks. These sites use real people to help tag articles to help create more relevant search results, and build communities around those folks as they share information and destinations. It’s a fascinating advance in Web culture, and it’s emerging rapidly.”

PC Magazine have put together an analysis of their choice of five of the neatest sites, including del.icio.us, Yahoo! My Web 2.0 and Jeteye. Check out their reviews for details on how well these services work, and then visit the sites for a look into the future of the World Wide Web.

Re-imagining office culture

“The Perfect Office Culture…

…probably doesn’t exist, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to provide an environment where everyone feels trusted, empowered and a part of the team.”

So says Keith Robinson, the author of To-Done!, a regularly updated collection of thoughts, writings, tips, tricks and information on personal productivity, work/life balance and getting things done. He is also a contributor to Lifehacker – currently one of my favourite daily reads.

His recent post, titled Empowerment and Office Culture, suggests that if you work in an office culture absent of trust, you will not do your best work. Or, if you’re a leader, creating an office culture that lacks trust will stunt productivity. This is not a new statement, nor is it a complex concept, and yet Keith’s questions still ring true:
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From ink to audio

Yesterday on the 26th day of the 10th month of the year after last, TomorrowToday.biz went audio in the form of a Pod Cast channel. We’ve jumped in on Odeo and as of a little while ago we had 3 shows ready for you to listen to or download.

If you use iTunes to listen on your PC or to update your iPod then you can add Odeo as a channel in the ‘Pod Cast’ section of your iTunes.

To do that all you do is….
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How are you losing out?

A post with the title, Mind the Conversation Gap at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion caught my eye today, not only because TomorrowToday.biz uses a framework with a similar title (see Mind the Gap), but because in the post he has supplied solid emperical backing to the school of thought that encourages companies to think long and hard about possible opportunities to connect with customers and stakeholders via blogs on the Web.

To generate the data, one needs to employ the services of blog trend tools (like IceRocket’s Blog Trend Tools), and the process can be a little cumbersome, but the results are staggering.

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Computer Games at School – Your help needed

I do quite a bit of work with my girls’ school, and have convinced them to start a computer games club at the school – as an extra mural option for the girls at the school.

But, now, they’ve asked me which games I would recommend. What would you suggest?

They obviously would be interested specifically in multi-player games. What would you suggest?

Then, they have hardware constraints. Specifically, they don’t have great graphics cards. If you were limited in this way, what would you then recommend?

China’s Generation Y

I don’t often recommend a book before reading it myself, but this book has caught my eye, and I wanted you to know about it. I have ordered a copy, and will review it in detail in a few months’ time.

It is China’s Generation Y by Michael Stanat ( (get it online at Amazon.com).

The book is unique in that it is the first book written on China’s Generation Y and one of the few well-written non-fiction books written by a teenager (the author is 17). The book is based on extensive research sponsored by SIS International Research, New York (www.sisinternational.com) and assisted by CBC Market Research, Shanghai (www.cbcnow.com). Fun, fast, and captivating, China’s Generation Y is the ultimate guide that Westerners will need to be able to work with the leaders of the future.

The Publisher says:
“Growing up during the information age, China’s Generation Y (born between 1981 and 1995) is unlike any of its predecessors, sporting branded items and increasingly sharing some of the same ideas as Western youth. This generation of teenagers in China will most likely be the political and businessleaders of the world’s next superpower by the year 2025. Based on interviews and surveys conducted in Shanghai by the author, an American teenager, China’s Generation Y provides an exciting look into the lives and minds of China’s youth, showing Western readers who they are, how they got there, and where they are headed. The book brings to life the influences on them – political, cultural, family, economic, and environmental – in such a way that it truly provides a rare glimpse into the minds of today’s youth and tomorrow’s leaders. China’s Generation Y is not only for those who seek to acquaint themselves with this crucial generation, but also for business leaders who wish to cater to the up-and-coming Chinese consumers. Informative and stimulating, this first-of-its-kind book opens up a new horizon for many in the West who will ultimately meet the need and challenge of this emerging Chinese generation.”

See also the book’s official website: http://www.chinageny.com/ – (not Firefox compatible – go to http://www.chinageny.com/html/main.html).
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Using the internet to get sassy with the Y generation

A report in Biz Community (1 Oct 2005), looks at targeting the Millennial Generation with websites. The report starts, “Internet AdSales reveals that the internet could seriously affect your bottom line when marketing to the youth of today.

They’re mobile, trendy, streetwise, technologically; brand and lifestyle savvy, have plenty of disposable income. They are highly developed, active key influencers, trendsetters and are using the internet on a daily basis.

Generation Y – renowned as the first internet generation; into multitasking and consuming media simultaneously – whether it’s blogging, chatting, shopping, dating, researching, downloading…

Previously ignored, as it was a challenge for marketers to keep up with this fast changing generation but not for much longer!”

Read more here.

From our archives: HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

“Understanding the underlying forces that turn success into failure”

The following thoughts are extracted from Jamshid Gharajedaghi’s book, Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos & Complexity (Pub. Butterworth-Heinemann. 1999) (buy it online at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net).

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average marked it 100th anniversary in 1996, of the original companies listed only General Electric had survived to join in the celebration. Fourteen of the 47 companies exemplified in Tom Peter’s much acclaimed book of the 1980’s, In Search of Excellence, had suffered serious profit erosion within four years.

Everyone can recall cases of great powers, nations, organizations or personalities rising and falling. What then are the underlying forces that convert success to failure?

Gharajedaghi’s suggests that there are five forces that form a hierarchy with each level representing a distinct tendency, but together forming an interactive whole. At each level success plays a critical but different role.
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Speedbumps for The Business Experiment

A little while back I posted about a new online, open source collaborative business startup called The Business Experiment (TBE).

To be totally honest, I am guilty of not really participating actively in the growth of the project so far (I did register early on in the startup process so theoretically should be contributing), having been busy trying to make a living out of cyberspace. I do receive periodic correspondence from the management team and try to interact wherever possible, but the truth is it’s hard to find time to commit to a peripheral idea like this one, regardless of how exciting or progressive it is. Real life gets in the way.

Check out the recent email I received from Rob, TBE’s founder. Clearly, he has concerns…

Hi Everyone,

There seems to be a problem at TBE. We put something up for a vote, and we get emails and forum posts about how we aren’t ready to vote on that issue yet. Nothing is getting done. The business plan has been “open” for weeks and it is going nowhere. This wisdom of crowds process for creating a business simply does not work. There is no accountability. We are experiencing the classic free rider problem where each individual lets everyone else do the work, and hopes that the crowd does good work and they get their cut of the next big thing.

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The Boomer tidal wave is about to hit old age

The Baby Boomers (born post-World War II and into the 1960s) have been a demographic tidal wave in every life stage they’ve entered so far in life. And now, they’re about to start retiring (or, at worst, re-tyring) and hit old age (although they’ll never admit it). Expect a pile of books to be written about this – its a tsunami for many industries. In the USA, for example, “On 1st January 2006, the oldest ‘Baby Boomers’ around will turn 60. After that, for the next 19 years, another one will turn 60 every 7.5 seconds, causing a demographic tidal wave will affect businesses with greater impact than the aging of any previous generation”, according to generational experts Brent Green & Associates (BGA).

Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers by Brent Green (Writers Advantage, 2004) (buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net). A book review was posted at TheWiseMarketer (click here to see it – free signup required – or see below).

Another resource we used extensively on this issue when writing our own generational resource two years ago (Mind the Gap, Penguin, 2004 – buy it at our online store, or Amazon.com or Kalahari.net), was Age Power: How the 21st Century Will Be Ruled by the New Old, by Ken Dychtwald (Tarcher, 2000) (buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net).
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A Letter from the President

Every Friday, Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, sends out an email to everyone who has subscribed to his free service. These emails are personally written by him, and he apparently refuses any editing or content development assistance. The President of Africa’s richest and most powerful nation is an idealist and academic, with a massive vision of what Africa could be (he has called for an “African Renaissance”). I’d highly commend his email to you: sign up by going to: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/subscribe.html.

This past week’s was an excellent reflection on the value of awards, especially the Nobel prizes.

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Is this keeping Bill Gates awake at night?

If you’ve been following the posts on this blog of late, or the tech world news in general, then you’re aware of Google’s charge toward world domination. Recently Google and Sun Microsystems signed some cooperation agreements that made the headlines for an hour or two. Here’s some of why the world and the Microsoft Office development team are taking notice:

An open-source group Thursday launched the final version of OpenOffice.org 2.0, a free application suite that’s drawn attention from governments interested in breaking away from Microsoft’s office application bundles.

If you want more detail then click here.

From ring tones to protest tones

We know the world is changing, and the change is being driven by new people doing some new things with new technologies. Convergence is one of the bigger drivers creating all kinds of interesting options and opportunities. Example: Just when you’d surrendered to cell phone ring tones simply annoying you, there’s an emergence of some that are not only going to simply annoy you, they’re going to drive a message home in the process. Here’s an example of a ring tone with a conscience:

“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” he says, and Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans” starts playing under the looped quote. The remark is a snippet from a speech Bush made in the flooded southern city, in which he praised Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown shortly before Brown resigned.

A new phenomina is using ring tones to make a statement as cell phones incorporate various media formats that allow you to use any sound bite you choose.

Click here for more of the story

You can’t keep a Google thing down

Internet search engine giant Google saw its third-quarter revenue nearly double from a year ago and profit rise in what usually is a slow Web surfing period.

Click here for full story

Nuf Sed

Tithing is the way to go

The biblical principle of tithing is to give to the work of the church 10% of your increase (your salary). There are reasons why you one is encouraged to do this. But the one I like is to compare tithing to that of planting seed. It could go towards an Aids home for orphans, or a soup kitchen, or an outreach. So although your personal contribution might be small, when accumulated everyone’s small contribution adds up to a very big difference in someone’s life.

Why the bible lesson? Well, I found another wonderful example of tithing. Tim Smit, the co-founder of the Eden Project (which in itself is awe-inspiring) is working on his Tithing College. This is a campus where business leaders, artists, scientists, engineers and bureaucrats will commit to spending 5 days a year sharing their knowledge. “Tithing College is central to my manifesto,” Smit explains. “It will attract those who want to imagine a new beginning and contribute to the debate, What does ‘great’ look like, and how do we get there?”
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The Perfect Talent Storm

Impending baby boomer retirements, a widening skills gap and outdated approaches to talent management are combining forces to produce a “perfect storm” that threatens long-term business performance, according to a new survey conducted by the Human Capital practice of Deloitte.

So starts a short report on Deloitte’s research, posted on Ireland’s accounting net website – click here to see it.

The actual research paper by Deloitte, entitled “It’s 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent Is? Why Acquisition and Retention Strategies Don’t Work” is available here, with a PDF download of the Executive Summary.

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The Sandwich Generation

Increasingly, Boomers are being seen as the “sandwich” generation – simultaneously caring for their children and their ageing parents. This trend is exacerbated by the twin facts that (1) today’s young people are taking longer than ever to leave home, and (2) older people are living longer than they ever have.

In Spain, the government is running some public service adverts trying to get younger people to leave home. Not leaving home is causing entry level home prices to plummet, and is stopping the development of a materialistic consumer culture required in all democracies to make the economy tick over.

In Australia, just yesterday the National Carers Association was warned of the increasing burden on women of having children later (median age of childbirth in Aus is now 30.5 years), and caring for an ageing population. (Read the full report here).

What was it all for?

Anyone interested in generational theory in Australia would do well to get hold of “What Was It All For? The Reshaping of Australia” by Don Aitkin (Allen & Unwin, 2005, ISBN: 1-74114-667-4) (it isn’t available on Amazon, and I can’t find a place to purchase it online – see the publisher page here, but I picked it up at Borders while in Sydney).

Aitken is apparently a well-known Australian social scientist and commentator, especially prolific in the 1970s and 80s. The book is largely the reflections on “the class of ‘53″, his matriculation year. After reconnecting with many school friends at a reunion, he tracks the changes in the past 50 years of Australian history, weaving in social information, facts and stories of his friends. Its an easy read, with some wonderful insights into Australia’s emergence as a real world-class player in the past 50 years. (Read a summary/review onloine here).

His book provides great inputs for anyone wanting to understand the cycle of Generations in Australia, clearly showing all the common generational moments (GI, Silent, Boomers, Xers and Millennials). A great read!

The Wisdom of Crowds

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take-off on January 28, 1986 who would have known that, out of the 4 publically listed contractors to the shuttle, the Dow Jones market singled out the party responsible prior to any investigation into the infamous O-ring that caused the explosion? This is one of the many case studies and examples that James Surowiecki lists in support of his premise in The Wisdom of Crowds (Buy it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net):

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Gen Y – your new workforce

Here’s what looks to be a great thread of conversation around Gen Y in the work place. Click here for the full thread

This is a generation has has been advocated for since their moment of birth, has had no line drawn between parents and kids, and has no fear about questioning anything or anyone. What kinds of shocking behavior have you seen from this new crop of talent (or their parents)? Has your company — or have you heard of companies that have — found a creative way to deal with it? Or is restructuring their organization to harnass some of the positive qualities (collaboration, etc.)?

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Which numbers are the important ones?

I sat in a meeting the other day in a company in an industry I’m not a part of, so there was lots to learn as I listened to the industry speak. The conversation turned to some discussion about LSM’s (Living Standard Measure – go here to work out your own LSM). What surprised me was the number of people who make up the LSM study. No more than around 14 000 people. Shock and horror. Some companies I work with give a fair amount of weight to this market segementation tool. 40 000 000 people make up the country (there abouts) and they’re using a sample of 14 000 to tell us about the LSM spread. Clearly I don’t know enough about research and exactly how many people you really need to make your research meaningful and useful?

And then I started wondering about the media and the numbers they report on every day. Take for exmaple the amount of people who turn up at an event and what the media reads into it. And let’s look at a current issue like the Jacob Zuma trial going on. Several years ago when less than 20 000 Durbanites arrived for a Whitney Houston concert, it was seen as a poor turnout. 1000 people arrive to Jacob Zuma’s trial last week, and the support is monsterous.

So who works this all out? Who are the experts that know these things? And it’s important stuff. In the case of the Jacob Zuma trial you’ve got a whole country trying to work out the current South African mood based on support for the various fragmented groupings. So 1000 who were there are a more important measure than the 39 999 000 who weren’t?

And there are countless examples that could be put on the table for discussion.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

When the Rules Don’t Work

The past few years have seen massive accounting scandals and corporate frauds. In order to protect shareholders, mounds of new legislation have been implemented. The key one is the Sarbannes-Oxley Act in the USA, which has had the effect of adding substantial cost and complexity to the auditing and reporting of company accounts. The auditors are smiling of course! But I’m not sure that shareholders should be.

These “rules” are not working. They are not having the effect that they should. In fact, they’re hurting business.

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Digital Revolution

The digital revolution is coming to Hollywood. Digital movies are now making it possible to bypass the massive hierarchies that exist in Tinseltown, allowing innovative directors to go direct to making movies, without getting bogged down in the politics and cost-spiralling of the movie studios, producers and big wigs.

Hollywood’s creative machine has long been mired in the bogs of big money players. Now, digital media are making it possible to bypass all of this. A possible tipping point is the release of Sin City by director, Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez left the Academies and “unions” of directors and actors, and did producing, directing, screenplay, editing and even the music from his own studios in Texas. With a monster ensemble cast, he also proved that he can get any actors he wants to.

And, now I see he’s planning a sequel already.

Its nice to stand on the edge of an earthquake zone, and see the earth twist before your eyes. If you want to read a more substantial report, check out this weekend’s FT – “A Defining Moment“.

Not even Apple can keep up with Apple

If you’ve followed the iPod story then you’ll know that from the begining the iPod was going to be about music, pure music. Then we got ‘picture pods’ on which we could load our images and view them, but Apple was on record saying that they were not going to enter the world of video.

Well not surprisingly all that has now changed. Welcome the iPod Video (Click here for the full story)

Even the great innovative Steve Jobs is a victim of his own words. Never-the-less bring on the video. (oh and you’re going to need to download a new verion of iTunes to get it all to work (but you’ve got to get that iPod first)

Sat next to a Bright Young Thing on the plane last night

When my grandfather was dishing out good career advice, ‘getting a job in a big company and staying there, and working your way up patiently’ would have been a theme he’d have followed. In fact my father didn’t stray much from that kind of thinking. But sitting next to an obviously talented 25 year old (and some may argue that at 25 there surely can’t be much talent evident at 25) on the plane last night didn’t surprise me that he’d recently left his first job in a very large blue chip consultancy after just 3.5 years, to join another large blue chip company.

The world has changed. Approaches to companies and your career has changed along with it. 25 year olds with talent can expect to have had several jobs in various industries before 35. In fact that kind of work experience is a sign of talent rather than a sign of lack of focus and commitment.

So how do you attract and retain yojur young talent today? The 25 year old I sat with thought it was a simple task, but this from someone who was onto job number two in industry number 2 in year number 4. Clearly he hasn’t seen any evidence that anyone’s got it right yet.

The world has changed, and any company taking a traditional approach to attraction and retention is in for a big surprise. But this is not news, this is their reality.

Nuf Sed

Blogging in the media

I’m sitting with the crew from SABC’s Business focus, doing a spot on corporate blogging.

Feel free to interact as part of the shoot!

In demand

One of the growing forces that is contributing to the talent wars in South Africa is “demand�. We know that Xers in their early careers aim to increase their marketability by building a portfolio as opposed to a CV. Bigger packages, flexible hours, freedom and the like all have an important part to play in the rate at which BYTs jump ship (or stay), but I have a hunch (if I have to look at myself as a BYT) that being in demand is one of the biggest factors. We want to be in demand – it boosts our ego and it proves to us that our marketability is working. This is especially true of young black BYTs in South Africa – the prices on their heads are exorbitant and it is all based on demand (much like share prices).

How do you keep an investor on the JSE loyal? You don’t – you have to entice her. And so when it comes to talent, companies are under huge pressure (and pain) to re-invent themselves into organizations that invite as opposed to coerce their BYTs into staying. This is tough news for business leaders as the implication is that their job needs to be more about managing talent than focusing on share price and shareholder value.

But is it only up to the company? Are we not regressing into Dilbertian mindsets if we believe it is only up to the company to solve this problem? I believe so. I reckon that there is also a mindset change required from BYTs themselves. Sure demand is wonderful, and the salaries are better … but what value is there in taking up positions that you know you are not ready for (despite what your arrogance tells you regarding your ability to adapt?).

More grandparents raising children

One of the major problems of the AIDS epidemic in Africa (and soon in Asia, Russia, China and India, too), is that it hits the middle age people most (mainly because in Africa, AIDS is sexually transmitted between heterosexuals). This has the effect of removing parents from society. Its hard to write that blandly, without feeling the impact of it in your gut – especially if you live in Africa at the moment. For example, The Starfish Foundation estimates that there will be over 2 million orphans in southern Africa alone, by the year 2010.

This is a demographic tidal wave.

But I was interested to discover that it is by no means unique to Africa, nor to AIDS affected countries. In Australia, for example, there are over 22,500 grandparent-headed families (see full report). The majority of those cases are a result of a parent’s drug or alcohol abuse, neglect, death or disability.

According to The US Census 2000, there were 2,350,477 grandparents in the USA responsible for raising one or more of their grandchildren (from GrandsPlace), accounting for 6% (or 4.5 million) of all US children. The literature on this phenomenon suggests that there are probably many more children in informal care arrangements residing with their grandparents than the data can capture, and the number is growing rapidly (see more info at National Center for Grandparents raising Grandchildren or Grandparenting.org). In the US, between 1990 and 2000, the number of children under 18 increased by 14.3%; within that same decade, the number of US children in grandparent-headed households increased by 30%. The data also indicates that grandparent-headed households are twice as likely to live in poverty as other American families.

This is a frightening social phenomenon.

MI6 online

A sign of the times…. ?

The British Government Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, has today launched a website – http://www.mi6.gov.uk. They don’t give any secrets away (doh) – check out the FAQ, where they won’t say how much budget they have, how many people work for them, or what they do (in detail). But they do take CVs from people (warning you not to tell anyone you have applied, though).

Its a sign of the times that the Secret Service has gone public, hoping the general population will help them with their secret tasks. Go figure.